Jonathan Dollimore’s Sexual Dissidence is a cogent, wide-ranging exami- nation of the problematic of sexual deviance in Western culture. Emerg- ing from the British intellectual field in 1991, the book aims to advance a history of sexual nonconformity on the basis of close, admirably nu- anced readings of a set of cultural texts spanning the early modern to the postmodern period. Dollimore’s larger project aims at tracing the development of properly sexual formulations of perversion out of earlier, moral and theological understandings which were at work in the culture of early modernity. One important portion of Dollimore’s project in- volves an attempt to adjudicate between Freud’s and Foucault’s theories of the perverse, and on this level it anticipates many of the key trends in queer theory in the 1990s. My consideration of Dollimore will be much narrower than the admirably broad approach of the book itself; the aim will be to focus more intently on its theoretical presuppositions than on the breadth of its literary and cultural content.
In many ways Sexual Dissidence is emblematic of the concerns of the British New Left critical tradition, one which was interested in, among other things, finding ways to balance a properly materialist interest in cultural politics with an appreciation for the specificity of the notion of unconscious desire in psychoanalysis. In consequence, Dollimore’s work stands out with respect to the mainstream of the American queer theory tradition in both its implicit assumption concerning the productive cen- trality of Freudian discourse to the theory of sexuality, and in its greater
sensitivity to the implication of instances of homophobic discrimination in dynamics of social power and class. Though the sophistication and nuance with which Dollimore traces common links between Freud’s and Foucault’s theories of perversion is not in question, my sense is that his work is insufficiently aware of the full consequences of Foucault’s mo- bilization of his concept of power. The uncommon rigor which Dollimore brings to his identification of what he terms a “perverse dynamic” in Freud ironically highlights the problematic aspect of his recourse to Foucault’s reconsideration of perversion as power. Dollimore’s Foucault reference retrospectively casts an unfortunate historicist shadow over his readings of Freud, and bespeaks a wider confusion of psychoanalytic and Foucauldian premises which in my view characterizes queer theory in general. As I will try to show, Dollimore only inconsistently comes to terms with the nonhistorical essence of the discontent Freud identifies within the dynamic of civilization.
In light of the available discourses on sexuality emerging from the psychoanalytic and sexological traditions, Dollimore distinguishes his own attempt at formulating a subversive agency associated with perver- sion from those attempts which seek, via a certain reading of Freud, to cast the liberation of a presocial “polymorphous perversity” in a revolu- tionary light.1 Dollimore’s readings of Freud highlight those instances
which not only dissect the mechanisms through which the ideals of civilization depend on the perverse desires they are meant to repress, but also subvert themselves by reproducing these same perversions. This aspect of Dollimore’s conception of the relation between civilization and perversion is therefore much more complex and intimate than the one presupposed by those who would posit that the liberation or desublimation of repressed instincts would find a straightforwardly emancipatory result. “There is something counter-effective in the very mechanism of repression,” Dollimore asserts, “and indeed within the entire civilizing process: instead of transforming perverse desire into civilized achievement, it counter-productively coerces the subject into a perverse or neurotic existence.”2 Dollimore clearly finds much subversive insight
in Freud’s insistence that an overly zealous adherence to the renuncia- tions civilization imposes produces subjects who impede the very project of civilization, disrupting even its capacity to reproduce itself.
This facet of Dollimore’s reading of Freud therefore presents the view that civilization is a kind of superstructure built upon a base of repressed, perverse instincts. This construction guarantees that perver- sion will reemerge within the official domain of culture, destabilizing its traditions, unsettling its hierarchies of value, and introducing an ele- ment of conflict and antagonism which cannot be resolved or surpassed.
The implicit social theory Dollimore attributes to Freud thereby pro- vides a method for tracing the social processes through which civiliza- tion effectively produces that which is antagonistic to it through the imposition of its own norms. This sociopolitical aspect of Freud, in Dollimore’s view, is the one most conducive to the materialist analysis he wishes to advocate.
Dollimore uses his appropriation of Freud’s theory of civilization to advance and develop his own concept of the perverse dynamic. This notion subtends that civilization may only reproduce itself through the pressure it exerts on the sexual instinct in the form of the renunciations and sublimations it requires. At the same time, culture3 draws upon the
perverse energies it suppresses in order to perpetuate its prohibitions. As a result, Freud accords to perversion, according to Dollimore, a certain logical priority over civilization. “It is sexual perversion,” writes Dollimore, “not sexual ‘normality,’ which is the given in human nature” (176). Because the demands of the instincts are perpetually at odds with the constraints of civilization, culture is inherently unstable, prone to disruption. In effect, civilization works against itself; it undermines its own normalizing efforts. By forcing the conversion of perverse energies into the sublimations of cultural achievement, civilization guarantees for itself a minimum level of neurotic discontent which threatens to resur- face, clamoring for a more direct satisfaction. “The pain of normality,” states Dollimore, “is not just the consequence of a more or less success- ful renunciation, but the effect of a radical contradiction, an extreme dysfunction” (177).
In his 1908 essay “‘Civilized’ Sexual Morality and Modern Nervous Illness,” Freud discusses the ambivalence of the instinctual renunciation civilization requires in transparently social terms, and Dollimore makes this essay the key to his formulation of the agency of perversion. His reading of this often overlooked text advances that the forms of sublima- tion sexual morality requires are damaging both to the individual sub- ject and to the social order because of the high cost in neurosis which renunciation forces the subject to pay. According to Dollimore, Freud “speaks of desublimated perversions as not merely alternative to civi- lized sexuality, but actively hostile toward both it and the social order which that sexuality shores up” (186). Whereas elsewhere it insists that perversion inheres in civilization itself, implying therefore the impossi- bility of a desublimation which would not at the same time be repres- sive, Dollimore’s argument here attributes to psychoanalysis a less paradoxical logic, one which would allow for a straightforwardly subver- sive libidinal release. Though this perversion capable of a subversive desublimation is no longer situated before or outside of civilization, as
it tends to be in the less sophisticated liberationist current, it nonethe- less retains its capacity to disrupt dominant norms, indeed to act against the social order as such. In this way, Dollimore’s analysis wavers be- tween its desire to distance itself from a straightforward liberationist paradigm and its aim to attribute a certain subversive agency to a notion of the perverse.
This ambiguity becomes more apparent in Dollimore’s interpreta- tion of Freud’s one-time definition of neurosis as “the negative of perver- sions.”4 On the one hand, repressed per verse desires support the
neuroses associated with the ideals of civilization and its sexual morality. For example, Dollimore quotes Freud’s observation that the analysis of neurotics never fails to uncover currents of repressed homosexual de- sire, and proceeds to comment that “the repression of perverse desire actually generates neurosis” (177). On the other hand, however, Dollimore attributes to these repressed perversions a potential “disruptive power” which threatens to sabotage “the whole process of normative psycho- sexual development (or subjection) upon which civilization depends” (181). Dollimore’s argument is that the activation of this disruptive power through desublimation causes civilization to produce the perversions it wishes to repress, disrupting through its action the coherence of the norms by which civilization is imposed.
It is here that Dollimore goes so far as to posit a conceptual par- allel between Freud’s theory of sexual morality and Foucault’s notion of power’s production of sexualities both normative and deviant. But before we embark on a closer examination of Dollimore’s reading of Foucault, I wish to make explicit what is at stake in Dollimore’s un- derstanding of perversion’s agency. For if, as one facet of Dollimore’s argument indeed acknowledges, the production of perversion is endemic to the terms of civilization—if, in other words, perversion is simply a by- product of civilization’s means of perpetuating itself, of reconstituting its own ideals—then the strategy of desublimation, of undoing the repres- sions which constitute the experience of acculturation, will not neces- sarily produce the emancipatory result Dollimore appears to expect. There is a strong sense in which Dollimore’s interpretation of Freud’s concept of civilization assumes it is complicit with an agency of sexual normalization whose effectiveness Freud’s work calls into question, though not without inconsistency. Dollimore’s contentions thereby reproduce the ambiguity of Freud’s own notion of civilization. This notion cannot decide whether it wants to designate a neurotic bour- geois sexual morality or rather the function of repression proper, in the sense of Freud’s contention that repression is a general a priori condition of desire, one which resists the historicist reduction at work
in all notions of sexual morality, from the most stiflingly bourgeois to the most purportedly emancipatory.
It will be helpful here to turn to the theme of the repressed homo- sexual desires of Freud’s neurotics, and to Dollimore’s suggestion that the desublimation of these desires would constitute an example of the political agency of his perverse dynamic. Dollimore’s argument assumes in this instance that the agency of repression concerned is expressed socially, in other words that the terms of civilization to which these neurotics need conform effectively enforce a prohibition against homo- sexuality. As I will explore at a later point, this assumption is akin to Judith Butler’s concept of the “heterosexual matrix.” What should be remarked is that Dollimore’s claim—that the lifting of this repression carries a subversive or emancipatory agency—is based on the premise that these neurotics are what one might term “repressed homosexuals”; that their authentic desires are effectively pushed underground by the force of culture. Dollimore’s questioning of a presumed heterosexual norm within the very terms of culture is consequently shown to rely on the imposition of a homosexual norm for desire, and in this way it loses sight of Freud’s fundamental argument about unconscious desire, namely that it violates whatever norm works to prohibit it. Moreover, Dollimore’s contention also implicitly qualifies the homosexual attribute of the re- pressed desire as perverse, thereby assuming the necessary or essen- tial link between perversion and homosexuality Dollimore elsewhere wishes to problematize in his readings of Freud.
Of course, there existed in Freud’s time, as there exist today and always have existed, subjects whose homosexual inclinations are nei- ther “repressed,” as Dollimore sociologically understands the term, nor particularly unconscious. What leads Dollimore to attribute sub- versive potentialities to desublimation and to qualify perversion as potentially transgressive is finally his confusion of what Freud terms “sexual morality” with the agency of repression as such. Repression, strictly speaking, is not coincident with the sexual norms created in the social world in its attempt to police desire. Freud’s musings on the dynamic of civilization stress how desire is essentially perverse, how its deviation from the law is constitutive of desire as such. If civilization decides it wants to ensure that desire will express itself heterosexually, in other words, then it is abundantly clear that this attempt necessarily fails. Freud’s dialectic of civilization is therefore not to be situated between a regime of sexual normalization and a field of repressed, perverse sexuality, but rather on civilization’s cultivation of an inher- ently transgressive, inexhaustible desire. In other words, desire is by definition a desire for transgression.
Dollimore’s argument comes very close to appreciating this paradox when he notes the following: “[I]t is when [the perversions] become an instance of the (in)subordinate entirely displacing the dominant (for which read heterosexual, reproductive, genital intercourse)—when they oust it completely and take its place in all circumstances—that Freud is prepared to regard them as pathological” (181). It becomes clear that Dollimore’s claim that his perverse dynamic “begins to undermine key aspects of the psychoanalytic project” is already understood in Freud’s own concept of desire. In consequence, Dollimore’s dynamic subverts only psychoanalytic projects which misattribute to the Freudian texts a notion of die ganze Sexualstrebung: a libidinal drive which would be fully reconciled with its presumptive genital aim. Though Freud himself oc- casionally deviates from his own position, his theory’s latent coherence, as I argued in the first chapter, asserts that the libido’s deviation from this genital aim is constitutive, that desire is fundamentally a missed encounter with the aim it sets itself. The “pathological” element to which Freud refers therefore devolves not from desire’s displacement of the dominant norm—a displacement which has always already taken place— but rather from the desire to normalize insubordination, to transform deviation into a new consistent law which does not latently work toward its own subversion.
To his credit Dollimore concisely extracts from Freud’s writing the full subversive impact of his universalizing thesis about the inherently perverse nature of human desire. In the terms of my own analysis, in other words, he uncovers the way Freud’s texts identify an essential perversity in desire which links the highest ideals of civilization to the base truth of its repressions and exclusions. But if desire is already antinormative, then Dollimore’s attribution to Freud of a “continuum” between perversion and normality is not entirely correct: If normal sexuality always misses its presumptive aim, then it is the very ambition of normality which becomes perverse, an insight which Dollimore him- self intuits when, paraphrasing Freud, he claims that “the real conserva- tive is the pervert” (176).
In spite of his endorsement of Freudian theory’s unsettling implica- tions for bourgeois sexual morality, Dollimore finally accepts Foucault’s claim that sexuality is a construction of discourse under the aegis of power. Though he bears witness to this claim’s “strange” character and, citing Jeffrey Weeks and Michael Ignatieff, mentions without further elucidation that it “remains vulnerable to the charge of functionalism,”5
Dollimore’s analysis conveys with relative consistency how he situates the problematic of sexuality, along with the agency of his perverse dy- namic, on the level of history and social relations, thereby sidestepping
the specificity of Freud’s concept of desire. The related assumption—it remains to some degree implicit in Dollimore’s text—that nonnormative sexual activity is in some unspecified sense transparently political is of a sort with the tendency, characteristic of queer theory in general, to attribute in an undernuanced way a politically progressive quality to gay subjects and gay culture. For example, Dollimore makes the vague claim that “the homosexual . . . in historical actuality” has “embraced both cultural and racial difference” (250). While it must certainly be recog- nized that the homosexual experience has a tendency to produce a greater sense of distance from familial or social acculturation than might other- wise, though by no means necessarily, be the case, there remains in my view something unsettlingly hubristic in the assertion that such a love of difference is a reliable outcome of an avowed homosexual orientation. Indeed, I would venture to say that such instances of gay self-privileging are dangerous in that they conjure the fantasy of the homosexual as the pure and innocent beautiful soul immune to xenophobia, misogyny, and the other politically incorrect crimes against difference.
Generally speaking, then, Dollimore’s method ultimately falls back on two basic assumptions intrinsic to the historicist approach to sexual- ity theory. First, sexuality is constructed by productive and regulatory categories which act in the name of social relations of power. And sec- ond, this production of hegemonic sexual norms also gives rise to their own contradictions or transgressions. The productive agency of power creates a conflicted social space in which the possibility for the rearticulation of sexuality is ambivalently produced and controlled. The norm and its deviation bear the same determinative relation to the in- stance of abstract power. The specifically Freudian contention which Dollimore also identifies, however, was rather that the norm effec- tively inaugurates a per verse desire for its own transgression, and that this desire is properly unconscious, in the sense of unavailable to knowledge. Thus, Dollimore in the last instance endorses Foucault’s view of sexual desire as coextensive with the forms of knowledge which effect its social construction; moreover, he reads the interdic- tions of civilization as a properly social agency which acts upon the subject through power from outside. In this way Dollimore erases the conceptual specificity of psychoanalysis, and is able erroneously to identify its analytic work with the deconstructive and historicist logics of poststructuralism.
In my view, then, the weaker points of Dollimore’s negotiation of Freud and Foucault run as follows. First, Dollimore demonstrates a tendency to transpose what Freud delineated as properly psychical conflicts—as conflicts internal to the logic of desire—onto the social,
thereby encouraging us to view social conflict as unrelated to the fun- damentally split structure of consciousness, from the subject’s separa- tion from itself. If we are to take Freud seriously, to negotiate psychoanalysis on its own terms, it must rather be acknowledged that the real of social antagonism is the same real which accounts for the splitting of subjectivity; the subject’s intrapsychic antagonism results from the same impasse which occasions the fundamentally antagonis- tic nature of social life itself. In consequence, there can be no workable concept of a social field which does not take account of its properly psychical apprehension by a subject of desire who does not appear within its terms. In the more specific terms of Dollimore’s argument, a perverse dynamic inheres in social relations because this dynamic structures the psychical realm as such.
Further, even though Dollimore is careful not to glorify the subver- sions of a presocial polymorphous perversion, he nonetheless maintains that the activation of perversion through the perverse dynamic carries inherently political and unambiguously subversive significance. Though what Dollimore means concretely by the agency of his perverse dy- namic remains ambiguous due to the abstract terms through which he ar ticulates it, it appears that per version, for Dollimore, may act